Big trouble Down Under as Australian MPs told to reset their passwords amid hack attack fears

PM Scott Morrison told the continent-country’s legislature earlier today that security agencies "acted decisively to confront" the attack, which first came to public light on 8 February when local parliament workers reset all their users' passwords.

"Our cyber experts believe that a sophisticated state actor is responsible for this malicious activity," said Morrison this morning. This is a shift from Australia's position on the hack 10 days ago, when the Speakers of both of the Australian parliament's houses jointly said the password reset had been "undertaken for abundance of caution" in response to an "incident".

The three main political parties – the Nationals, Liberal and Labor – are said to have been affected. Elections to the upper house of Australia's parliament, the Senate, are due to take place in around three months from now. No official sources have suggested election interference as a motive for the hackers, however.

Alastair MacGibbon, head of the Australian Cyber Security Centre (the Aussie version of Britain's NCSC, an offshoot of GCHQ), told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: "The sophistication of their methodology to operate in those systems gives us the confidence to say it is a state actor… There are a limited number of countries but we have low confidence at being able to publicly state who we think it is."

Both the ABC and the Sydney Morning Herald have floated the possibility that China is to blame, though both outlets heavily caveat this. The SMH reported: "Only four nations are thought to be capable of such a high-level attack: China, Russia, Israel and the United States."